Remember everything

What makes a good autobiography? Having recently read Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem, I have been thinking about this. Is it merely a collection of good stories, funny anecdotes, interesting yarns? Is it a mature reflection on the past? Or can a good autobiography offer something more?

Over the years, I have read and re-read An American Childhood, Annie Dillard's memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I read it first as a teenager living in the States, and delighted in the stories (particularly of her mother's jokes and antics), and in the flash of recognition of the world of privilege. I was living in Washington, DC, at the time, and from time to time glimpsed the world Dillard inhabited. Reading it again this week, I am delighted by her writing, her insight, and the way she can take the reader right back into the skin of a child.

Dillard grew up in the upper echelons of Pittsburgh society. Her playmates descended from the founders of American industry and banking; local streets were named after the families of her acquaintance. Hers was a world of private schools and servants, dancing school and country clubs. Families knew each other all their lives; it was expected that children would grow up and slip into a niche waiting for them. Much of her education appeared to be grooming to become a wife of old money.

And yet it was also a world of immense freedom. Dillard had the leisure and opportunity to investigate her world, riding further and further from her neighbourhood as she explored her city. She had access to books, microscopes, butterfly nets, drawing materials, everything she needed to feed her passion for knowledge. Whether it was collecting rocks, capturing insects or learning the rudiments of sleuthing, Dillard approached everything with intelligence and vim, and had the time to engage deeply and passionately with the world. Her parents gave her free reign in the library, and as well as the field guides she loved so well, Dillard devoured Hardy, Eliot and Dickens as a child.

Her memoir charts this privileged and joyful upbringing. She writes so vividly that we are taken alongside her as she explores the woods, is chased across the neighbourhood by an angry stranger, and pitches a baseball at a target in her garage. She clearly recalls the deep concentration of the child, the absorption in self-appointed tasks. Dillard writes with great good humour about her family, and we fall in love with them, just as we fall in love with that time and place, a time and place we have never known.

Yet what makes this book a masterpiece is not just the stories; Dillard also reflects more generally on the slow maturation of a child. She vividly recalls the way a child sees the world - her terrible fears, underlying assumptions, grandiose ambitions (to remember everything, to learn all the world's languages) - and in so doing, draws us back into the way we too saw the world once. She writes with insight and beauty about the dawning of consciousness, and describes the child's growing awareness of herself, and of time, history and society. And as she writes about the world as perceived by an intelligent, passionate, investigative child, we too are invited to see it with fresh eyes, young eyes, which are thrilled by almost everything.

> Annie Dillard An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

A 'pissalis'

Warning: I am a proud mother as well as a very frequently interrupted reader, and what follows is a soppy announcement: My 3 year old daughter 'read' me The Very Hungry Caterpillar today. I was idly enjoying it as she sighed, over and over again, And he was still hungry... And then my heart did a great big happy flip flop as she told me that he made a 'pissalis' (a chrysalis, to those of you unfamiliar with the pronunciation of a 3 year old).

It renewed my already flaming passion to fill my house with good books for kids, books which respect the reader and are packed full of interesting language. To hell with the thousands of inane kids' books, soggy, bland and boring. May they rot. Here's a list of some of my favourite picture story books, in no particular order. These books are graceful, funny, beautiful, intelligent, and a joy to read. We've read them all dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and we're not sick of them yet! Some of their phrases have become part of our family language; now if that's not a test of a book, then I don't know what is. If you haven't come across them, seek them out, then settle in with a young child for a leisurely afternoon.

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak ('Milk in the batter, milk in the batter, we make cake and nothing's the matter.' Sung loudly while making Sunday morning pancakes.)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle ('and he was still hungry').
We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen ('we're not scared...').
Rose Meets Mr.Wintergarten by Bob Graham ('Catch, Mr Wintergarten!').
Grandpa and Thomas by Pamela Allen ('Swish, swash, swoosh, sings the sea.')
Too Loud Lily by Sofie Laguna ('Lily Hippo, not so loud!').
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen ('and I almost smiled, too').
Moon in the Man and Honey Sandwich by Elizabeth Honey (two collections of poems, mostly memorized by my kids by the time they were three).
Auction! by Tres Seymour ('a dollar, a dollah, who'll give me a dollah?')
Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo by Julius Lester ('Ain't I fine?!').
The King of Capri by Jeannette Winterson ('and the fifth thing that the Wind did was to blow the mustaches off the nightwatchmen'.)
and for slightly older readers, Clarice Bean, That's Me (Clarice Bean) by Lauren Child ('Right now you are NOT the flavour of the month young lady.') (My kids repeat this and laugh themselves sick. They also love the Charlie and Lola stories, especially I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato).

Buddha bless Father Government!

When I think of the early eighties, I think of Cambodians. I was a child when the first wave of refugees moved into my suburb, and my parents cared passionately about their plight. So during the week we trailed my mother as she mediated at the old DSS, negotiating their pensions; kicked our feet as she lobbied the local member of parliament for better treatment of refugees; fooled around with kids in strange smelling dimly lit houses; and played hide and seek among old clothes and furniture at The Store, where my mother and her friends collected second hand goods to set up households for families fresh out of the hostel. On weekends, we got underfoot as my father moved people from hostels to housing commission flats, carrying battered sofas and wardrobes up narrow stinking concrete stairs.

I never thought too much about what these mostly quiet, gentle and loving people had gone through. Once, after I'd been particularly ratty, bored out of my brain while my mother painstakingly worked through some forms with a family, she told me that the family included an informally adopted orphan girl, my age, who had witnessed the murder of her entire biological family. And once, when I was idly admiring a Mambo t-shirt with skulls and crossbones (I was going through a pirate phase), she asked me how I could want to wear that when we knew so many people who had been to the Killing Fields, or who had been robbed or raped by pirates on their way to Australia. Unanswerable, really.

Mum was good at making me feel terrible, although she genuinely thought she was trying to educate me. I still resent that a bit! But I don't resent the people she worked with. The families I knew were extraordinarily gentle and generous despite their terrible experiences and poverty. They would visit with boxes of Cadbury's chocolates (some women worked in the chocolate factory), or with an exquisite jacket sewn especially for my mother by outworkers. One man gave my sister and me our first, thrilling, digital watches; he also turned up one Christmas Day with a black tarry ointment especially brewed for my sick father. ('Just put it on where it hurts, then rip it off,' we were instructed. My father, prostrate in bed, went white. He had the mumps.) For no reason other than that we were our parents' children, my sister and I were loved and treated as part of a big extended family.

So it was with great interest that I turned to Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem. Pung's parents were Chinese-Cambodian refugees; the book is a memoir of her childhood. Pung was born in Footscray and grew up in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. The story charts from before her birth through to university.

It is a funny little book. On the one hand, it is full of well-told stories from both before and after she was born. The reader is entertained by the loud exclamations of the women in Pung's family as they encounter the marvels of the West ('Wah!' at pedestrian crossings, 'Wah!' at escalators, 'Wah!' at the abundance of food at the supermarket, not to mention the fortnightly blessings of Father Government, which deposits money into the accounts of useless old people). We are drawn into the world of her elders: her mother's isolation in a new country; her grandmother's grief as children died or were taken away in Cambodia; her father's musings at the Footscray Market as her mother is giving birth. Pung writes compellingly about the rift between her and her mother, exacerbated as Pung's language and thinking shift further and further into English and they are no longer able to communicate freely. Her mother is virtually silenced at the family dinner table as most conversations move into English; she compensates for this by becoming louder and more abrasive everywhere else. And Pung can write. She crafts beautiful sentences, beautiful paragraphs which are vivid, illuminating and intelligent, a sheer joy to read.

On the other hand, at times it feels like we are being invited to laugh at, not with, these funny little refugees who think purple polyester is the ant's pants. While it is clear that Pung loves her family, and includes herself in the jokes, at times the writing makes me uncomfortable. It goes beyond irreverent to a place where I wonder how relaxed Pung really is about her heritage; how much can you laugh at your family before it looks like you are embarrassed by them? There is, at times, a slight lack of respect in the writing; some of the stories make me cringe. Pung's mother, desperately unhappy, looks for a spiritual cause, and I don't feel like laughing when she realises that it's because the family shrine is situated in a room below the ensuite toilet. Yes, it's funny; but what untold losses have refugees experienced? Of course grief will assail them at every turn, disturbing them by day and waking them in the night; laughing at Pung's mother's struggles to understand is not my first response.

The stories also shift uneasily between amusing anecdotes and devastating sadness. I am not sure which way the book is intended; a story about removing headlice jostles against a story about being an outworker, which runs into a story about the sudden death of a beloved young child. Which impression are we to be left with? The small annoyances of childhood: headlice and toilet accidents? Or the terrible grief suffered by those who have lost children? They are weighted equally. Perhaps this is deliberate on the part of the author, who was conceived in a refugee camp but born in Australia; as a child they may have felt equally important to her. Yet it rests uneasily with me.

The book moves from vivid stories about Pung's family and her childhood to her depression in late high school, and here the writing loses some of its strength. The shift feels abrupt, like something has been left out - perhaps the transition was a bit of a mystery to the writer too. But the contrast between the strong, clear writing in the first half of the book with the vague passages and long internal monologues of the second half is disappointing.

While one review describes Unpolished Gem as "virtuoso storytelling", I suggest it's more of a debut. Good stories told with vivacity are weakened by long meandering patches; the second half of the book needs a good edit. It reads like what it is: a book written by a young woman learning her craft in a country with a small editing budget. Yet Pung does have talent, and it will be interesting to see how it develops as she matures. I look forward to reading a more polished gem in a couple of decades.

> Alice Pung Unpolished Gem (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006).

Pretend the long grass is the sea

I'm nuts about gardens. I love to wander through them; I think about them all the time. When I can't sleep at night, I take myself for an imaginary ramble through a large garden. Awake, I walk everywhere, and find hidden pockets of glory, or even single trees, around my suburb. I cannot get enough of gingko leaves, or lime green euphorbias, or even homely rapa or chicory growing in lieu of a lawn. Just knowing that lots of people are out there Growing Things thrills me.

And I love garden things. Not glossy garden shop accessories, but the old laundry sinks that have become pots; the rusted out bike entwined by a creeper; the faded hammock shivering in the breeze. In one of my favourite short stories, a couple drink beer at the bottom of the garden in an old rowboat surrounded by long grass.

Pity about my own garden. It's dry and dusty, weedy and tired. I make noble vows about working in it for ten minutes a day, and plant out seedlings bought in optimistic moments, but some days it feels like a complete no-hoper.

That's why I need garden books. They are my ticket to dream. But the dreaming becomes ridiculous when I look at gorgeous books of French gardens set on hillsides. Too much beauty makes me despondent. Too much misty rain and photos of mud and I am gripped with envy. I need encouragement and enthusiasm fit for a small dry inner urban block, not the dreams of Northern Hemisphere princes.

Michael Mccoy's Garden, by a Victorian garden writer, is perfect. McCoy writes about developing his own garden on a suburban block over the course of a year. He writes about the labour of digging up lawn and shovelling compost; his backaches and failures; and his delight when things go right. He is an enthusiastic plantsman, detailing the virtues of this plant or that; and he charts the development of the garden with stunning photographs that I return to again and again. These photographs celebrate both the individual plant and the striking combination. They are photos to wander through, an invitation to dream, and yet the concepts are simple enough to influence the way I plant. In my garden, thanks to this book, feathery cosmos flowers pink against rigid grey euphorbias, and I get a thrill every time I see the combination.

Influential too is an older book, Surviving in the Eighties. The first part of the book is about small animal husbandry, and is full of fascinating if, to me, utterly useless information such as how to raise a herd of goats or incubate chickens. But Part Two of the book, Surviving in the City, profiles half a dozen gardens crammed with plants. The focus is on growing one's own food, although many non-food plants are mentioned; and it is startling how much a gardener can squeeze into a city block, whether it's just tomatoes and herbs, or espaliered trees. There are vigorous discussions on how to deal with gardens soured by generations of cats' piss or heavy pollution, or the pests that develop in areas with very few trees. The writing is enthusiastic and opinionated; it makes me feel that I, too, can grow tomatoes and green leaves and have great fun doing so. In fact, this book is responsible not only for my garden full of rocket and rainbow chard, but for the seven espaliered fruit tree saplings I planted last year. I dream of apples yet.

Even if I don't have a prince's budget or a garden on a French hillside, I still treasure whimsy. I love hammocks and outdoor showers, hidden garden rooms and rowboats sunk into grass. Gardens for Pleasure answers this need. It suggests themes such as Night, Butterflies, Reading, Resting, and Tea, then suggests ways to develop a garden around each theme in small, medium or large gardens. Many ideas are do-able, and its plant lists are useful, but it is really a book for meditating on. While few of us will go to the effort of building a small one-person sized island in a pond (in the Resting Garden), the book evokes questions about what we enjoy in a garden; how we might like to rest, or read, or sip tea there; and how we might develop a garden, or even a nook of our garden, in a way that matches our taste and budget. Gardens for Pleasure contains no glossy photographs. Instead, it is so beautifully illustrated that even my five year old curls up with it to scheme and dream of the garden she would like us to have.

Speaking of which, does anyone have an old rowboat?

> Blog title quotes Lisa Merrifield 'What I did with what I knew' in Splash (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1998); Michael McCoy Michael Mccoy's Garden (Glebe, NSW: Florilegium, 2000); Michael Boddy & Richard Beckett Surviving in the Eighties (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980); Brodee Myers-Cooke Gardens for Pleasure (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1996).

It may prove amusing, after all

When I think of places, I think of detectives. Venice: Brunetti. Paris: Maigret. Sicily: Montalbano. Boston: Homer Kelly. Hong Kong: CF Wong. Moscow: Fandorin. Botswana: Precious Ramotswe. Italy: Zen. And each of these characters, these collections of stories, sound so much more interesting than the people I know in the place I live: Melbourne, a pimple at the ass-end of the world. What's to love about Melbourne, a city choked by traffic and smog, a people gripped with passion for nothing more than the latest plasma television or footy score?

So it was with real gratitude that I discovered Kerry Greenwood's love song to this city. She is the author of a series of mysteries set in the Jazz Age featuring the elegant and opulent Phryne Fisher. Phryne, who is slender of ankle, careless of opinion and quick of wit, has a passion for slinky dresses, fast cars and interesting young men. When she is not indulging these passions, she solves mysteries. On the way she collects eclectic people: a stouthearted maid, Dot; some raving Communist taxi drivers, Bert and Cec; a hearty female doctor, Dr MacMillan; and her exotic lover, Lin Chung.

With her cool head, her allies and her pearl handled gun, she is more than a match for the most vicious of crims walking the city streets - or drinking tea in the leafier suburbs.

Her first novel, Cocaine Blues, sees Phryne returning to Melbourne after years in England. Suffering from ennui, she decides to try being a Lady Detective. 'It may prove amusing, after all,' she reflects. She moves into the Windsor Hotel, and from there begins to investigate whether a young English woman is being poisoned by her Australian husband. In so doing, she also unravels an abortion racket and a cocaine ring, and becomes erotically involved with an aristocratic Russian dancer. This novel is based in the CBD, and as Phryne strolls down Collins Street, shops in the Block Arcade, and steals through the very seedy Lonsdale Street, I fall in love with Melbourne all over again.

The Phryne novels are written with a deft hand by an author who clearly relishes gorgeous dresses and fine dining - and Melbourne - and wants us to relish them too. And she uses some lovely imagery. A cab driver says that a formidable hostess is 'as mean as a dunny rat'. Phryne muses to herself, 'One cannot take much except intelligence and religious convictions into a Turkish bath'. Her lounging robe is an oriental gold and green pattern, 'not to be sprung suddenly on invalids or those of nervous tendencies'. And Phryne drives like a demon. 'She set the car at Spencer Street as she would set a hunting hack at a hedge, and roared out, scattering pedestrians.'

Never pedestrian, always glamorous, these books are a delight.

> Kerry Greenwood Cocaine Blues (first in a series) (Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 2005) (originally published by McPhee Gribble, 1989).

Inheritance

I have been thinking about inheritance. Not about dead people's stuff, but about the gifts that are passed down from one generation to the next. On bad days, it feels like my oldest daughter has inherited all my worst aspects: a fierce temper, stubborn independence, a thin skin. And I sigh and wish it could be otherwise. But on good days, I see that my three year old loves to paint, and in her absorption I see my grandfather, a painter. My five year old can run and run, just like her daddy, and read and read, just like her mamma; and she displays all the intuition and empathy of her grandmother.

Inheritance is important to me, because my children's grandmothers died before they were born. I see my kids mourn the loss of something they never knew, and I mourn, too. I want my children to know their grandmothers, not just in stories but more deeply, perhaps even to recognise their qualities in themselves. And so, as they grow older, I have begun looking for stories about inheritance, stories which will teach them that gifts and abilities run through families and bind generations. Carrying on the gifts may not always be straightforward, or easy, but it is possible. Those who die are not wholly lost. Their qualities live on in us, and it is up to us to explore and refine them.

And as I have been thinking about these things, I stumbled across two short stories by Joan Aiken. Among her many other books, Aiken wrote at least a dozen collections of stories for junior readers, those readers in between picture books and adolescent or adult fiction. Although they are aimed at ten year olds, I still find them captivating. I am thrilled when I find another dog eared old book of Aiken's stories; I mete them out one by one so I can go to sleep dreaming of friendly cats and apple trees, princes, mermaids and jumble sales. Aiken's stories interweave the everyday, the whimsical and the downright magical. A rainbow is trapped in a poky London house, and put through the wash. The quintessential suburban family is visited by a unicorn, or the Furies, or a ghostly governess. A young girl carves a harp from a fishbone, and stirs a frozen city with her music. A girl uses a London callbox to call across time and warn against Queen Boadicaea's impending attack.

And several of Aiken's stories tackle the theme of inheritance. In 'Moonshine in the Mustard Pot', Deborah visits her Granny. Granny is full of life and vigor. She paints her house in lively colours; she grows her own vegetables; she makes pies and jam; she rides across town on a wobbly old bicycle; she reads the newspaper to her houseplants; she learns a poem a day; she chats to her bees. After Deborah returns home, Granny is hit by a car. Deborah rushes to visit her at the hospital, where Granny tells Deborah to talk to the bees. Deborah goes to the bees, and we are to understand that, in telling them, she comprehends that her Granny is dying and that she is to inherit her grandmother's gifts. The story is very simple, but strong. It is not remotely maudlin: Granny dies; Deborah cries, then gets on with the business of living. It is a good story for any older child, but particularly one who may be facing the death of a beloved grandparent. The story tells them, in effect, that they too may carry on aspects of their grandparents' lives; their grandparents, though sorely missed, will live on in them.

Similarly, in 'The Gift Giving', a child takes on his namesake's gift. When Mark's uncle pipes a special tune during a gift-giving ceremony, blind Grandmother touches gifts and describes their appearance perfectly. After Uncle Mark dies, Grandmother pines so terribly that the younger Mark learns to make a pipe and teaches himself to play; and his cousin Sammle helps to recall the special tune. When the time comes for the next gift-giving ceremony, Mark plays and Grandmother is again able to perceive the gifts placed in her lap. This story is especially beautiful because Mark strives for the gift of music in order to give the gift of insight to his Grandmother; his gift enables the gifts of others.

Each story is part of a collection marked by wit, beauty, whimsy, and a touch of melancholy. Aiken's stories are nourishing stuff. They are by turns beautiful, sobering, or just delightfully ridiculous; and her mixture of the magical and the mundane, the folkloric and the suburban, is unique. Although these books are well and truly out of print, they are worth the time and effort it will take you to find them. Perhaps your public library has them; or perhaps you will be lucky enough to locate second hand copies. Or perhaps, if you ask around, you will inherit them!

> Joan Aiken 'Moonshine in the Mustard Pot' in The Faithless Lollybird and Other Stories (New York: Doubleday, 1978); 'The Gift Giving' in Up the Chimney Down and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

Serendipity, mostly

I just love books. I love holding them. I love smelling them. I love turning their pages. I love reading them. So you'd think I love new bookshops, right?

Actually, I don't. I find myself so overwhelmed by our society's wealth, by the sheer amount of stuff that is available to us, that I usually can't face a shop full of new books. I shrink in the face of those towering shelves stuffed full, perpetually refilled from boxes and crates which were trucked from factories, perhaps even flown in. I feel sickened by the waste involved; I read somewhere that more than half of all new books manufactured in the US are pulped. I worry about the clean water that has gone into making the paper. I feel manipulated by the beautifully designed covers and gorgeous new editions which are aimed at bibliophiles like me. And, anyway, I'm not that interested in a book which is too easy to find.

So how does someone like me buy books? Second hand, of course! and on instinct. I don't look for books unless I get a particular buzz. When I feel my antennae tingling, I'll pop into an op shop or a used bookstore and comb the shelves. I never know what I'll find, just that something is there waiting for me. And when I see it, I start feeling dizzy. The world whirls, and for a moment there is nothing except me, and The Book. I pick it up. I take it to the counter. I hand over my dollar. I buy it.

Anticlimactically, I take it home and add it to a pile. What? you say. But you just bought it, antennae quivering!

But finding a book doesn't mean it's time to read it yet. It sits on a pile, even a bookshelf, waiting. In our house, a book might wait for years. I know it's there, but until I feel my instinct tingle again, I wait too. There's no point reading a book at the wrong time; I won't engage with it. But when I feel that tingle, that itch to read a particular book, then I know I will be carried away.

So that's how I find and read new (to me) books. What about books which I have already read, but have given away, or have never owned but absolutely must? Especially those that are out of print? How do I find those books? Then I wait. I lurk. I creep into old bookshops and check if they have this, or that. I mope and sigh, pining for a book. And then one day, joy! After months, usually years, of looking, it turns up. Such delight! It's like being united with an old friend.

(I must admit, the waiting sucks. From time to time, in sheer desperation, I check out an online secondhand bookseller. But while a package in the mail, even one sent to oneself, is gratifying, it certainly isn't the same as finding a book on a shelf. I don't feel an emotional attachment to books bought online; it's just too easy.)

There are books I can't decide whether or not to buy. I'm hooked on Patrick O'Brian's novels, and plan to read and re-read them for the rest of my life. But a friend has the series, as does my public library. Am I happy to keep borrowing these books? Or should I purchase them so I can lend them out to other people too? I might keep an eye out and buy any I find second hand. Then I can slowly build up the series, without having to face a new bookstore, and without feeling completely wanton in my spending.

Quite bluntly, O'Brian's dead, so he doesn't need the royalties. What about living authors, particularly those with a small market (ie Australians)? I feel some responsibility to buy these books new, on the radical assumption that authors have to eat. For a new book, I go to my local independent bookstore and, if they don't stock it, order it in.

I don't buy books from chain stores. I worry about having my information controlled by large conservative corporations; and anyway, the sheer mass of goods is overwhelming. Paradoxically, it's in a small store with handpicked stock that I am more likely to find something nestled against something else that I'm interested in. I've checked out Amazon, and the 'picks' that the machines suggest don't even come close to the cover that catches your eye, the title next to the one you went to get, that serendipitous find.